


rhymes Of worlds that I contrived

by clytemnestras



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-12 23:22:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20572616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: the costume doesn't make the man





	rhymes Of worlds that I contrived

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).

**one**

He forgets sometimes, when they're in the apartment, or the study room, now that belonging is a statement of fact and "our" is a perfectly normal way to refer to another person or six, that Annie has known him through a whole other lifetime.

He remembers in stages.

Maybe it's as he comes out of the bathroom freshly showered on a Saturday morning wearing his football jersey from highschool over spiderman boxers. It's worn into that specific kind of comfortable that is three washes from disintegration, and fits his shoulders like he's slipping into the warmth of glory days without all the tension weighed them down.

She's already buttoned into a pink cardigan, mid-sentence, as she and Abed stream-of-consciousness argue the way he can never keep up with about post-cancellation Futurama, when she looks up and sees through him, choking on her cereal. Annie gets up without a further word, without meeting his eye and locks herself in her bedroom. Abed tracking both of their movements with an eyebrow raised.

Or, no.

He remembers this three days later as his eyes go wide midway through conversation with Britta and _oh, right, that's why._

Annie had made pancakes the same morning, and given him the extra one when things didn't divide up even, and the look in her eyes hadn't changed so it's fine then, probably, maybe, he thinks.

He put the jersey in the laundry basket but hasn't seen it since, and it's more fun to twist that into a journey through _Launlandria_, the secret world of lost socks and chewed up sneakers than to play detective or risk her face crumpling again. He's more solid, anyway, with a bedsheet around his shoulders in a fancy cape than something that still remembers the worst of the bruising. She flies with him, hands on his shoulders and thighs around his chest through _Suddsville_ and _Detergentopia_, pleased with how they clean as they go, with how playtime counts up now to _one, two, three._

*

It's weird, maybe that she might know him past and present, but he knows Abed better than he knows even modern Annie. (What he does know is this: her charmingly sensible shoes are always laced before he's out of his pajamas, she has a day circled in the calendar that says update calendar day!, and her barrettes are ordered by size in a box beside the sink.)

Abed and he fit, though, and she's there to keep them spinning on the orbit of functional.

But he catches them out of the corner of his eye when they're playing Star Wars, and Abed-as-Han smirks and rubs the back of her hand, and Annie-as-Leia blushes a touch, leaning into him, and wonders if Abed doesn't know her better, too. If Troy is the only one without the cheat codes to his roommate's feelings.

He remembers as they lean in to kiss that he's the hero of the story, that they both love him in one way and each other in another. Something makes his stomach flip there, maybe the oreo-and-ham-on-rye he had for lunch or maybe the lack of space between Annie and Abed's bodies.

He doesn't hurl until three scenes later, but Abed explains it away in universe and Annie strokes his hair through the worst of it, each of them with one hand on him and neither on one another.

*

  
He doesn't have a list, but if he had one, then Batman would probably be at the top of it. That wasn't always true, not before he met Abed, where he would have come in a distant second to Spiderman, and maybe even third behind someone like James Bond, who is kind of anybody Troy wants him to be, wrapped up in a bow tie.

But whilst Troy has been spending his time compiling fictional lists of fictional characters he might, theoretically, wanna do gay stuff with, Annie and Abed have built a cityscape out of their living room, her skeleton catsuit blacked out for a form fitting Catwoman, and his cowl pulled firmly down over his brow as he whispers gutterally in her ear.

There's something in that, in the voice, or the way his body language shifts to solid and semi-detached that makes Troy's knees go kind of weak. But Annie is also here, her bodysuit like a second skin, easing the cowl up just enough to hiss something back and the room swims in blacks and greys, and costumes that cling.

He watches this time, as she wraps one hand around his jaw and drags the other, firmly in character, down the line of Abed's spine. She pulls him down to her, kisses him fiercely, as if it's something she's been desperate for, as if she's spent all her time in the apartment picking up their shoes and re-ordering Abed's cook books (but never the DVD collection) quietly wanting this, only letting it come out when they're make-believing a world where it's okay to be hungry. Maybe he knows her better than he thinks.

Troy's head swims with images of fictional men and women pulling each apart with mouths and teeth and leather and he can't remember who he's supposed to be playing, can't remember what was happening before he was stood in this room.

"Guys," he says, softly, but they're both too wrapped up in the scene, Catwoman smearing the red of her lipstick all across Batman's mouth and okay, already. "_Guys_," he says, louder now, something with feeling.

Annie pulls back, eyes are already pulled into Disneyfied concern, and he can't see Abed's eyes beneath the cowl but he can see the red on his lips.

"Troy?" She's already there, already holding on to the crook of his elbow, which is maybe worse, but maybe it just makes him falling apart easier.

He mutters a sorry, facing Annie but watching Abed, and then he kisses her, soft and full of something he doesn't have a word for.

She surrenders to him, slips into the familiarity of being kissed, her mouth still slightly swollen from kissing Abed, and my god, can his brain stop that before he straight up collapses on the living room floor. And crap, that's it, he's hard, right there in the middle of Gotham City, and she can probably feel it because somehow this is both the best and worst day of Troy's life.

"You've betrayed me," Abed says, his voice still pitched low, making the two of them spring apart. It is like a fingernail tracing patterns along the top of Troy's spine.

"No, that's not -"

"I should have known Catwoman would cross me, it's in her nature." He growls. "She knows I can't resist a lady in trouble. But I'll know better the next time that kitten crosses my path."

And oh, he remembers now, he's the villain in this story, and Annie hangs on his arm somewhere between light and dark, reading exactly the right amount of conflict on his face.

  
**Two**

She surprises him with how willingly she slips into costumes and characters to not just placate him, but to meet him on a level. Even now, whilst Troy is at football practice and it's just the two of them, she sits on the arm of his chair and slots their fingers together and imitates Monica on _Friends_, because they both agree that she's her best fit, and Abed is Phoebe, maybe. (He makes his offended scoff when she implies there's some Ross mixed in there and she nods, sorry, as if she understands.) Troy is somewhere between Joey and Rachel, formerly popular and drowning in everyone else's expectations, trying to find himself in the big wide world and yet endearingly charming and occasionally madcap. They clink their glasses when they come to an agreement on this, Annie smiling down at him from over her shoulder and curtain of hair.

He wonders, as Annie shifts her voice up and yells_ "I know!"_ in pitch-perfect imitation if it means anything, these sitcom-shiny boxes they've been putting each other in. He wonders about that psych class Britta dragged him to as her _friend with intermediate mental quirks,_ where everyone picked apart childhood traumas and defining moments like they were the last chicken fingers in the lunchroom.

Vicky stood up just as he was losing interest and had said, "I don't think I'm actually a fully real person, I'm just an amalgamation of every fictional character I latch onto."

Britta had nudged him then, pointed, right between the ribs and smiled in her half-baked nervously pleased way.

He sees what she saw, that line of intersection between feeling made up and his whole thing with TV, but it's not the same. He doesn't feel like his personality is just recycled parts of every character he idolises and desires to mirror, he wishes it were that.

Abed knows what he is.

He can cycle through as many characters and settings as he likes, mimic them, feel on their behalf, but he's not them. None of them make up the whole of him, no matter what bits he tries to make stick when he notices positive response.

If he was his fictional idols then he wouldn't need to spend so much time hunting through hours of TV for emotional resonance like a dictionary of Things People Feel and What They Mean just to keep up with the swirling vortex of Troy and Annie's emotions. Abed feels in logic: Troy + Annie = good. They both seem to feel in the abstract.

It makes him worry, though, sometimes, when they're making up stories about love and adventure that maybe Annie wishes he were that amalgam. She looks at him differently, through her eyelashes, the way she does at Jeff when she wants him to notice she bought a new sweater. He thinks he likes it, that look, but he's iffy about the context.

So they play more often, and she indulges herself with anti-villainy and self assured sexiness in a way he recognises, and it's possible they're both doing the same thing to one another, or to themselves. It makes more sense when they're not who they are. Still, even when they're being themselves, riffing on sitcoms there's that layer of once-removed and he wonders if they've come too far to pull of the domino masks.

She cracks a joke and he's there with her, laughing like her personal live studio audience, but one who can squeeze her hand back when she shifts in space.

*

He knows Troy better, what makes his voice pitch up, where the line lies between fiction and feeling, though it hasn't stopped him occasionally overstepping the boundary now and then.

For example, now, in the Dreamatorium. Abed knows Troy likes playing Reggie not just because it's a fictional world where the limits truly are the breadth of their collective imagination, but because he likes the construction of role and uniform, something he misses from his highschool quarterback days.

"Where to, Inspector?" he asks, grinning from ear to ear, already expecting Abed's response.

"My dear Reggie, perhaps you mean _when_?"

"I think that might be my favourite episode to play out," Troy says, fiddling with the shiny silver buttons of his jacket, tapping them against the backs of his nails.

"Cool," Abed says, undoing the bathrobe. "Hey Troy, do you wanna have sex with Annie?"

Troy's eyes go wide, wider, and he shrieks in his allcaps voice, "What? I mean… I don't know, do _you_ want to _have sex with Annie?_" He claps his own hand over his mouth when he realises what he's said, and then shrieks some more, inarticulately into his palm.

Abed feels his eyebrows lower, his head tilt. "I don't know, I hadn't considered that. Maybe."

"Okay," Troy nods, catching his breath. "Me too, maybe, I think?"

He looks like he wants to say something else but he presses his lips together instead. Abed recognises it, it's an Annie move, and he wonders if he'll start picking up on her inflections or she'll start wearing his emotive eyebrows.

"Dude," Troy squeezes his hand around Abed's bicep. "You know that either way, you're still my best friend, right? You're like my favourite person in the world."

Abed mirrors his movements, his own hand on Troy's firmly muscled arm and squeezes back.

Troy smiles at him, tucking his chin a little. "Love you, man."

Abed nods, and hopes Troy knows what that means.

**Three**

It's so strange the way he embodies her, slipping into her skin whilst she sits back and watches them (like documenting, like him.)

She sees how he matches her timidity, glancing down at his own hand on Troy's knee.

She's forgotten how they got here, the walls of the Dreamatorium long folded into the simulation of the study room, Abed having cycled through playing Jeff and brief imitation of Britta before landing here, curled close to Troy in a way she has hardly imagined since their first year, before Jeff had blustered through her carefully aligned emotions and slightly rattled the place. (And long before Abed first slipped into Han with her, first drew himself around with that slow sardonic voice and kissed her long and deep whilst the world melted in brutal orange.)

So he plays her younger, a bit more infatuated, a bit less of the half-maturity she's built in this place of breakfast for dinner and blanket fort bedrooms. He plays her like she was a fiction, a Velveteen Rabbit of a girl and through love and belief and will alone Abed and Troy have made her a real girl.

It makes her look at him again, Troy, and it's kind of comfortable to feel the longing tug in her belly, like catching the eye of a poster that once hung in your childhood bedroom. Except, well, as a rule she doesn't know what Mario Lopez or James Vanderbeek taste like, but she has kissed Troy, has melted against him just the once, and watching herself - watching Abed - leaning in again makes her insides twist a thousand ways.

Troy stops him with his hand just as Abed is within touching distance, just, actually as their lower lips are already brushing. "Hey," he says. "I'm not playing."

_No_, she thinks. _I wanted to see_. She feels herself inch forward, needing to be closer to this odd mix of want and warmth and discomfort phasing over both boy's faces.

Abed pulls back, says, "Cool. Cool cool cool." He shrugs her off like a coat, and just like that there is one Annie, one Abed, one Troy.

"No," Troy says, leaning into Abed's space, and Annie's insides flutter in a way she's not completely comfortable with but still kind of aches for more of. "I said I'm not playing. This isn't playing." Troy squeezes his hand on Abed's thigh, watching Abed's eyes follow his movement so he can duck down and press their lips together so achingly softly Annie can barely stand to watch. Except, of course she can. How could she look away? Troy grasps at Abed as if he's afraid the other boy might slip through his fingers and Abed for his part sways softly to a rhythm she can't follow, literally moved by the way they fit together, like they were always almost there.

"Oh," she breathes when they pull apart, both lightly panting, looking into each other's eyes.

"Hey," Troy drums his fingers in the side of Abed's neck. "Is this okay?"

Abed looks down at the floor, at Troy's mouth, then leans in again, pulling Troy up against him, mouths slipping together in a way Annie has never seen in real life, hungry but worryingly tender.

She clears her throat and they pull apart again, Troy's pupils blown and Abed's hair lightly missed from Troy's wandering hand.

"You better not have done that just because it's what would work in a movie." Troy tips their foreheads together and laughs like he's giddy, and oh, okay, maybe Annie is kind of giddy, too because she wants to laugh. Or cry, maybe. Or launch herself into both of their arms where it's comfortable, like she's gotten used to.

"It's true, that would be very cinematic," Abed tilts his head slightly to capture Troy's reaction. "But I did it because I wanted to. Because it felt right."

Annie smiles despite herself, then slowly realises that they're both looking at her, as if waiting for direction.

"Um...hi?"

Troy knee-walks over to her and presses his palms into her thighs, and okay, she's never paid attention to how much warmth he exudes before. "Can I kiss you too?"

"I…" She presses her knees together, her mouth together, somewhat intimidated by the earnestness of that question. "Okay," she says. "Yes, please."

And then Troy is there his body gently prising her legs apart, making room for himself within her space. He touches her shoulder, her hair, her neck, before his hand settles on the back of her head and reels her in for a kiss.

It's…good. Soft, gently teasing, as if he's testing what she will let him do. It's sweet, but that timidity makes her feel bolder. They could be crossing a line they can't go back over, but she drags her nails along his scalp anyway, teases her tongue against his lip until he opens for her and yeah, that's good, that's better. He teases back, matching her rhythm, and that semester of dance has more than paid off. He moves with her, his tongue soft and sweetly curious and when he pulls back his eyes are wide and glassy.

"Woah."

She smiles against his mouth. "Woah yourself."

"Abed," Troy turns between her legs, the weight and warmth of him having become the new familiar. "You have got to kiss Annie it's awesome."

She laughs and teases her fingers lightly along his scalp. "We've kissed before, Troy, you know that."

"Not like this," Abed supplies, walking over to meet them, and okay, she probably shouldn't like the sight of two boys between her knees so much. "Not as just us."

"Oh," _right_, they only ever do this as play-pretend. This is something else. Something more permanent.

He smiles up at her in a way that makes her stomach somersault, something soft unfolding on his features. "Do you want to, Annie?"

She nods, because her voice has firmly exited the building and is skidding down the fire escape when he smiles a very pleased smile before leaning up to kiss her.

He kisses differently to Troy. He still lets her take the lead, let's her escalate the tempo at will, but he's less pliant, more assured. He's not scared, she realises with a small thrill. When she pushes him he opens in an instant, slipping his own tongue past her lips and mirroring her movements. It's like he's asking what she likes simply by following her lead. She wants something inarticulately _more_.

He pulls away first, biting down lightly on her lower lip, and beside them Troy is vibrating in place.

"Are we like. Doing this? For real?"

Annie looks between them, meets Abed's eyes for a small moment, and nods. "I mean. I think I want to. Or, no. I think I don't want whatever this is to stop."

"Cool," Abed says, folding his hands into both of theirs. "Cue sex montage."


End file.
